Enrico Rava New Quintet feat. Gianluca Petrella

Enrico Rava first studied piano then trombone, but in 1956, influenced by Miles Davis, he taught himself the trumpet. His career only really took off when, as from 1962, he started playing with Gato Barbieri, Don Cherry, Mal Waldron and Steve Lacy. In 2004 he was proclaimed 'Jazz Musician of the Year' by the French Académie du Jazz. On the bridge of sighs, Enrico Rava blows melancholy notes into eternity. Like Soren Kierkegaard, Rava's melancholy exposes the human soul. It is the underlying theme of his musical oeuvre. To this end Rava conjures a cool wind out of his trumpet, with an unreal beauty and the glow of the aurora borealis. He creates an amalgam of deep-rooted lyricism peppered with experiments of the positive sort from free improvised music and an almost genetically determined Mediterranean melodiousness. In Rava's music, the notes he doesn't play are just as important. His new quintet plays music which is on the one hand is dreamy but on the other harmonically exciting and rhythmically challenging. Their striking elements include the warm and pithy synergy between Rava's trumpet and Petrella's trombone, the great freedom given to the rhythm section and the open spaces in the collective sound. 'I like the sort of contemporary music that has form, tempo, harmony and melody, but I also want to be able to break the rules with total freedom when I feel like it. If I don't, I stick to the rules,' says Rava.